Chapter 9
Epilogue

"Comrade! Let the Proletarians of all countries unite. Come home with me."
Petrograd prostitute (1917)

The yellow ticket was one of the many trademarks of tsarism that the Provisional Government discarded after the fall of Nicholas II in February 1917. Like so much else about the old regime, regulation symbolized unbridled authority, class and gender inequality, and—perhaps the worst sin of all—a failure to heed the demands of modern medicine. Beset by war and revolution, not all the cities and towns in the Russian empire complied, but the word from the new authorities in Petrograd was to cease issuing yellow tickets.

Of course, an end to the yellow ticket did not mean an end to prostitution. The social and economic conditions that contributed to prostitution persisted, exacerbated by the hardships of war. Wartime deprivations among the civilian population increased the supply of prostitutes, while the enormous presence of soldiers and sailors in large cities like Petrograd augmented the demand for commercial sex. More fundamentally, gender inequality and the ideology of gender remained intact to nurture the overall system of male consumers and female commodities.

Now that regulation was a thing of the past, the time had come to confront the tough questions about prostitution that a seemingly united abolitionist front had obscured. But the problem of how to treat deregulated prostitution was short-lived—at least for the Provisional Govern-

ment. In less than eight months, it itself was overturned. Hoisted by popular dissatisfaction, the Bolsheviks came to power in October 1917. The task of what was to be done with prostitution fell to them.

Not only did regulation of the trade have no place in the Soviet system, but in keeping with socialist theory linking prostitution with capitalism, for the first time it seemed possible to forecast prostitution's demise. Indeed, in 1918, at the Bolshevik-organized All-Russian Congress of Working Women, the elimination of prostitution was high on the agenda.^[1] In the meantime though, prostitution endured, forcing socialist theory to confront a complex and painful reality. A utopian streak within the socialist movement had prevented consideration of how to cope with such stubborn "remnants" of "bourgeois" culture. The Bolsheviks, like most European social democrats, refused to imagine anything other than social class as an organizing principle for society. As Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders learned, however, the roots of prostitution were sunk even more deeply than those of capitalism. Continuing economic hardships, gender inequality, the sexual double standard, and the simple fact that commercial sex paid better than other forms of female labor, combined to keep prostitution a profitable trade for women.

During the period of War Communism (1918–21), Lenin's pithy admonition—"Return the prostitute to productive work, find her a place in the social economy"—partially materialized, as draconian labor and military conscriptions affected all of the Russian empire that fell under Bolshevik rule. To Aleksandra Kollontai and the 1919 Interdepartmental Commission on Prostitution, incorrigible prostitutes fell in the same category as labor deserters.^[2] But when Lenin and the government retreated from the radicalism of War Communism in 1921, open prostitution predictably resurfaced, enlivened by social and economic dislocation and widespread unemployment during the New Economic Policy of the 1920s.

The Bolshevik leaders perceived the prostitute as a victim of economic and social oppression; she was a good woman who went bad because of circumstance. In that sense, she deserved pity and government solicitude. This took the form of policies directed against prostitu-

[1] Stites, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia, p. 330. Quote from Petrograd prostitute on p. 371.

[2] Elizabeth Waters, "Victim or Villain: Prostitution in Post-revolutionary Russia," in Women and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union, ed. Linda Edmondson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 163.

tion as a business, not prostitutes as individuals: theoretically the state targeted pimps, procurers, and brothelkeepers for prosecution. But local authorities understandably had trouble distinguishing between prostitutes and prostitution. They were known to "borrow the methods of struggle practiced by the tsarist police," such as roundups and arrests.^[3]

Despite the sympathy that came her way, the prostitute was still considered a fount of disease and disorder, much as she had been seen by the Bolsheviks' tsarist predecessors. The presence of prostitutes on Soviet streets was an embarrassment to the socialist regime, just as the contagious sexual infections with which prostitutes were associated seemed to require active intervention. Soviet authorities fulfilled goals that had been articulated by doctors and abolitionists during the late Imperial period: they tackled venereal disease through broad programs of education and strove to make treatment accessible and nonstigmatizing. Yet the vision of prostitutes as serious dangers to public health did not abate.

As Richard Stites and Elizabeth Waters have suggested, the Soviet state vacillated between regarding the prostitute as a victim and treating her as a villain.^[4] Both images were reflected in Bolshevik policies, which ranged in the 1920s from the paternalistic to the punitive. "Prophylactories"—sanitariums designed to train prostitutes in useful labor like the needle trades—were one example of the former.^[5] Ironically, these institutions were reminiscent of the houses of mercy that the prerevolutionary socialists had scorned. Many of the inmates responded in kind, such as the woman who declared, "Who needs your sewing machines?"^[6] As the House of Mercy and ROZZh had discovered and as the Soviets were beginning to realize, not all bad women were eager to be good.

By the beginning of Stalin's first five-year plan, official attitudes shifted in favor of repression. The "designation of the prostitute as a socially-dangerous element deserving punishment had triumphed."^[7] Intolerance of prostitutes and broad employment opportunities during the period of rapid industrial growth (1928–41) did not fully eliminate prostitution, but they did succeed in driving it underground for several

[3] Volf M. Bronner, La lutte contre la prostitution en URSS (Moscow, 1936), pp. 30–31.

[4] See Waters, "Victim or Villain." The dichotomy is posed as "parasite" or "victim" in Stites, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia, p. 373.

[5] See Bronner, La lutte, pp. 44–47.

[6] L. S. Fridland, S raznykh storon: prostitutsiia v SSSR (Berlin, 1931), pp. 60–61, quoted in Stites, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia, p. 374.

[7] Waters, "Victim or Villain," p. 173.

decades. On the surface, The Great Soviet Encyclopedia appeared justified in its boast of having "liquidated" prostitution. The trade in women apparently took place only in the capitalist world, where female labor meant exploitation and abuse. In the optimistic tradition of The Communist Manifesto, the encyclopedia maintained that conditions which "engendered and nourished" prostitution had "disappeared" in socialist states.^[8] But the glossy picture hid the fact that prostitution had not really vanished. One of the first revelations during Mikhail Gorbachev's tenure was the falsehood of that claim.

The twin polices of glasnost ' and perestroika gave rise to a more realistic assessment.^[9] During the 1980s, it was acknowledged that prostitution in a variety of forms had not only survived under socialism, but had earned status among the young as a "prestigious" occupation.^[10] At present, prostitutes in post-Soviet Russia can count their weekly earnings in valuable foreign currency or in millions of rubles, while other working women are lucky to earn wages in the thousands.^[11] The gap in income spells the difference between access to nice clothes, home appliances, food, and foreign travel, and a life waiting in long lines for the bare necessities. With wages low and prices rising in the current Russian economy, prostitution is one of the few exits from a life of poverty and deprivation.^[12] That, coupled with the persistence of a double standard of sexual morality and gender inequality in the workplace, gives it much in common with prostitution in the late Imperial period.^[13]

[8] See "Prostitutsiia," Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia (1970). According to Marx and Engels, "[T]he abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of . . . prostitution both public and private." Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, ed. Samuel H. Beer (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1955), p. 29.

[9] On recent views of prostitution, see Elizabeth Waters, "Restructuring the "Woman Question': Perestroika and Prostitution," Feminist Review (1989): 3–17; Waters, "Changing Views on Prostitution in the Gorbachev Era," Soviet Social Reality in the Mirror of Glasnost, ed. James Riordan (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992).

[10] A. A. Gabiani and M. A. Manuil'skii, "The Price of 'Love': A Study of Prostitutes in Georgia," The Soviet Review 30, no. 3 (May–June 1989): 71.

[11] A prostitute working in the hotels for foreign tourists can earn 200 dollars (as of mid-1994, 360,000 rubles) for one trick.

[12] Two Soviet women interviewed in a 1990 documentary for British television described prostitution as the sole means at their disposal for attaining happiness. Lichtenstein, "Prostitutki."

[13] Discussions and examples of the sexual double standard can be found in Lynne Atwood, The New Soviet Man and Woman: Sex-Role Socialization in the USSR (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 109; Sergei Golod, "Sex and Young People," in Sex and Russian Society, ed. Igor Kon and James Riordan (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 138; Carola Hansson and Karin Liden, eds., Moscow Women (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), p. 171; Gail Warshofsky Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society: Equality, Development, and Social Change (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 238–39, 259.

The emergence of prostitution from the socialist underground poses a great dilemma for current authorities. In accord with longstanding traditions, they too view prostitutes as a threat to both public health and public order. The specter of syphilis has been supplanted by that of AIDS, whose incurable status is often invoked to justify active intervention, that is, policies recalling the three I's of identification, inspection, and incarceration.

Recent responses contain many familiar elements. A deputy minister of internal affairs, for example, added his voice to a chorus in favor of the forced testing of suspected carriers of disease.^[14] To date, although the Russian government has not mandated statewide regulation, many local officials in and out of Russia have taken the initiative to deal with prostitution precisely in that way. In 1987, Soviet Russia (Sovetskaia Rossiia ) reported that the operations chief from Moscow's sixty-ninth precinct had a card catalog containing files on some 3,500 alleged prostitutes.^[15] In Moscow, the police stage periodic roundups of the Russian women who frequent the expensive hotels. The women they haul in on suspicion of prostitution are brought to a local venereal disease clinic for mandatory medical inspections.^[16] (Sadly, in a society where disposable needles are generally unavailable, blood tests for syphilis and AIDS pose at least as great a risk as unprotected sexual relations.) In Belarus, the Minsk police maintain a "special album containing photographs of all the [local] 'ladies.'"^[17] Authorities in the Latvian capital of Riga have revived the three I's fully with their policy involving the registration of all women believed to be prostitutes, regular medical examinations, and forced treatment for women with sexually transmitted diseases.^[18]

[14] Ted Koppel, "Sex in the Soviet Union," ABC production aired on December 19, 1990. A Lieutenant-Colonel V. Mikliaev has also promoted the establishment of a "morals police" (militsiia nravov ) in Moscow. L. Kislinskaia, "Prostitutsiia vyidet iz podpol'ia?" Moskovskii komsomolets (November 1, 1990).

[15] "A Hard Look at Prostitution in the USSR," The Current Digest of the Soviet Press 39, no. 11 (April 15, 1987): 1–5. I am grateful to Paul Goble for this reference.

[16] See Lichtenstein, "Prostitutki." Moscow registrations numbered 974 according to a 1989 interview conducted by A. Mosesov, "Poryv liubvi?" Sovetskaia kul'tura, no. 79 (July 4, 1989). An article later that year referred to 1,126 registered "elite prostitutes." See "Interdevochki 'v zakone,"' Moskovskaia pravda, no. 28 (November 28, 1989). My thanks to Sara Mebel' for these clippings.

[17] "Manners and Morals," The Current Digest of the Soviet Press 38, no. 41 (November 12, 1986): 21. Paul Goble also provided me with this reference.

[18] A "morals police" has been organized in Yalta as well. See "Moskva tozhe rekordsmen," Moskovskii komsomolets, no. 108 (June 7, 1991).

The resurrection of regulation in Russia and areas formerly in the Russian empire and Soviet Union reveals the way gender ideology has outlived some 150 years of stormy history. A huge circle has been closed—from the start of regulation in 1843 to its resumption in recent years. The convictions that undergirded the MVD's initiation of regulation in the mid-nineteenth century and sustained the yellow ticket until 1917 never disappeared completely; the best that can be said is that they met challenges in the revolutionary era. Even when regulation was abolished, the concept of bad women lived on, mitigated only by optimism in the early Soviet period that socialism would eventually make them good. Prostitution's tenacity suggested to Soviet authorities that something else was called for. In the 1920s, showing a singular lack of vision, they returned to the sewing machine as a means of salvation. Prostitution decreased during the Stalin and post-Stalin era, but given widespread poverty, the persistence of inequality at the workplace, the conditions of female labor, the sexual double standard, and the readiness of men to pay for sex, it has made a stunning comeback—and there is no more talk of it withering away. In trying to cope with prostitution as a social problem, contemporary Russian society is ignoring the lessons of history to repeat questions that were posed by tsarist officials of the late Imperial era. Ironically, economic want, gender ideology, and gender inequality are acting in concert to elicit similar answers.